Micromax on Monday launched its latest budget device in Canvas series dubbed the Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 at Rs. 5,999. The specifications of the Xpress 2 are quite impressive for the price, but is it really good enough? Here’s our first impression of the smartphone.
Upfront, the Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 packs a 5-inch HD (720×1280 pixels) IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and pixel density of roughly 294ppi. The display is nice and bright, and doesn’t attract too many fingerprints / smudges. The touch response is also decent. The polycarbonate back of the Xpress 2 has soft matte finish and feels nice in hands. Overall the smartphone feels premium and sturdy.
The dual-SIM Canvas Xpress 2 is powered by a 1.4GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6592 SoC with ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It runs dated Android 4.4 KitKat OS out-of-the-box, but Micromax has promised that the phone will be upgraded to Android Lollipop in future.
We felt that the phone lags a little despite of an octa-core SoC, and it seems that 1GB of RAM could be the reason for it. The internal storage is 8GB, but users will get about 5GB of free space. Further it supports microSD card expandability up to 32GB.
The Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 packs a 13-megapixel autofocus rear camera with PureCel technology, 5P Lens, and dual- LED flash. There is also a 2-megapixel front-facing camera onboard.
Above the display sits the notification LED along with earpiece grill, two sensors – proximity and ambient light sensor and 2-megapixel camera. The three capacitive touch buttons – Back, Home and App switcher – sits with in the display.
The 3.5mm audio jack and secondary noise cancellation microphone sits on the top of Canvas Xpress 2. The bottom features Micro-USB charging / data port along with two speaker grills, out of which right grill locates the loudspeaker (poor output) and left grill is only the primary microphone.
Left edge has nothing and the Right side features the volume rocker and power / lock key. The handset is backed by 2500mAh battery.
The handset supports dual-SIM (Micro-SIM + Micro-SIM), but only supports 3G and no 4G. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and USB OTG. Vodafone users get 500MB of free 3G data per month for 2 months. It will be available exclusively from Flipkart through flash sale starting from August 4th from 2PM. Registrations for the sale begins today from 6PM on Flipkart and ends mid-night of August 3rd.